Turns out John Waters was hitchhiking because he's writing a book about it

Earlier this month, Brooklyn band Here We Go Magicpicked up John Waters hitchhiking somewhere in Ohio and the entire Internet freaked out. It seemed, well, magical, this idea that cult directors could just appear from nowhere on the side of the highway and ride with unsuspecting motorists and pop culture nerds for hours at a time. In the public's mind, John Waters was a rebel who did what he wants when he wanted to. Well, as it turns out, John Waters is out thumbing it on the open road because he's writing a book about the process.

In an interview with The New York Times, Waters said the book, Carsick, is about going from coast to coast in eight days, and will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who published another book of his back in 2010. Specifically, the book is about Waters' "over-scheduled" life and "what will happen if I give up control."

Waters has been hitchhiking since he was very young and did tell an Australian newspaper in 2011 that it's a "great way to have sex." Of course, after years in the entertainment industry, Waters is pretty recognizable and told the Times that there's "not an airport in the world I’m not recognized in," but that people think twice about his identity when he's on the side of the road. Only about a third of the people who picked him up knew who he was, he says, but that the other two-thirds picked him up because of his pencil-thin mustache. "I had it working," he says.